


Heart To Hand

by talkingcute



Category: Emelan - Tamora Pierce
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-06
Updated: 2018-10-06
Packaged: 2019-07-27 06:26:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16213334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/talkingcute/pseuds/talkingcute
Summary: A quiet missing scene between Sandry and Daja, set at some point during the first few books.





	Heart To Hand

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Seika](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seika/gifts).



Daja found finally Sandry—in the last place she bothered to look, as Lark always said. She had tucked herself into a corner in the back of Rosethorn’s garden, half-hidden behind some kind of tall, yellowish plant. Briar would have identified it for her, probably, if she’d cared enough to ask.

“There you are!” Daja said, setting herself down besides Sandry and sighing with feigned exasperation.

Sandry looked over at her and smiled. She hadn’t bothered to change out of her fine court clothes—something in Daja’s Trader soul cringed to see the silk against the dirt, although rationally she knew that there was no chance of Sandry doing any kind of harm to cloth. The only thing missing was the veil that she must have been wearing, for propriety’s sake, much as she disliked them. 

It occurred to Daja belatedly that Sandry might have wanted to be alone, if she’d come back so quietly that even Lark hadn’t seen her. Or she might have been meditating, or doing something else with her magic that didn’t bear interruption.

Instead she reached out and squeezed Daja’s hand. 

“Here I am,” Sandry agreed. Between her smile and her hair, she gave the impression of being as golden as the plant next to her. Daja looked carefully at the work in her lap, but it was only simple embroidery, with no sign of magic to it. Or, no sign of magic to it yet.

“It’s been a long morning,” Daja told her. “You were lucky to be out of it. I’m surprised you can’t hear Briar and Tris from here.”

“Oh, no,” Sandry gasped. It was funny to see her so instantly concerned. Daja bit back a fond laugh; that was Sandry, always acting the role of the indulgent mother to her friends. “Are they really still angry enough to be shouting at each other?”

“No—I don’t think so, at least. So far as I can tell from a safe distance they’re only sulking at the other’s general direction.”

“But what happened?” Sandry asked, embroidery forgotten in her lap.

“Something to do with a leaking pot and one of Tris’s books— I didn’t pay much mind to the storm itself, only its effects.” Sandry looked really concerned, so she added: “Nothing serious. It’s only that neither of them had parents to teach them manners.” Daja still did not believe any non-Trader could have been raised properly. “Anyway, you ought to have seen Rosethorn try to handle them.”

“Oh, no,” Sandry said again, but this time she was laughing already, even before Daja elaborated.

“She said she’d take each of them by the scruffs of their necks and drown them like kittens, if they didn’t stop glaring at each other at the table,” Daja said, grinning at the memory. “I sat in my chair and laughed till I almost cried, and she threatened to throw me in after them. But I haven’t seen any lightening since then, so I guess the storm’s settled.”

It was a beautiful afternoon. Daja lay on her back, letting her face feel the sun and her back the good, solid earth beneath her. Her muscles ached from the work of the day, but it was a good, solid ache. It was like a private proof that she’d done something useful, that she carried a gift making her body into a tool that could forge raw metal. 

“How’s your uncle?” she asked. It occurred to her that it would have been polite to ask earlier.

“All right. He asks after all of you.”

“That’s kind of him,” Daja said lazily. “Doesn’t he usually come here, when he wants a visit? He might have asked himself.”

She remembered the old rumors about the duke’s health, and wished she’d thought to phrase the question with more kindness, but Sandry’s voice was perfectly casual when she said, “Yes, but this time there was a delegation he wanted me to be there to meet. That’s why I’m making this.”

She lifted the cloth from her lap. Daja raised her head obligingly. There wasn’t much to see besides faint, dusty marks where Sandry had marked out the pattern with chalk. The needlework itself only filled one small corner, which made sense, with how small and fine Sandry’s stitches were. The cloth was big enough to be a challenge even for a stitch witch.

“It’s supposed to be a snowflake pattern,” Sandry explained. “It’s very popular in Namorn, I think. I don’t remember it very well, but Uncle said Cousin Berenene would like it.”

Daja smiled. She always found it funny when Sandry automatically downplayed her noble relatives. 

“It’s been a long time since you’ve done any work that wasn’t just useful,” she said. “Not that your embroidery isn’t useful. I mean compared to spinning, and weaving and such.”

Sandry was nodding. “It’s because it was the only kind of cloth work I was allowed to do for so long,” she explained. “I just got so tired of it! Do you remember when we first came here, and I kept trying to give everyone embroidered wall hangings?”

“Those were beautiful,” Daja said. “Tris loves hers. I think that was when she first started to like you.”

Sandry smiled at that. “It’s been so long that I borrowed embroidery thread from one of the court ladies. I thought it was so kind of her to offer, and just look at it!”

Daja actually laughed when she looked into the elaborately carved wooden box. The thread was elaborately tangled, so much that it looked like some kind of demented embroidery in its own right. “How could that even happen? Even I know not to keep thread completely loose.”

Sandry sighed dramatically. “I don’t even like looking at it. If you wanted to do me a favor—“

“All right, all right,” Daja said.

Sorting the thread was exactly the kind of dull, absorbing work that she wanted in that moment. It took barely a minute for Daja to forget that the thread was not a living enemy determined to make a fool out of her. None of the ends were visible; all of the knots had tightened to the point where Daja’s fingernails couldn’t quite make them loose.

It occurred to her that Sandry could have sorted the thread herself with a wave of her hand, rather than giving Daja an excuse to stay out in the sunshine with her.

That was thoughtful of her. And it was thoughtful of the duke to suggest that his niece make her cousin the Empress of Namorn a gift. The Duke of Emelan was always said to be cunning, although Daja had never seen him behave in any capacity other than a loving uncle. Daja knew vaguely that Sandry had some kind of land holdings in Namorn. If she ever wanted to go back, then it would be good for her reputation to be established as that of a powerful mage as well as a noblewoman.

“Would you ever go back?” Daja asked suddenly, feeling an odd kind of panic. Sandry looked at her, confused. “To Namorn, I mean.” She felt suddenly very foolish; of course the duke did not plan on sending his young niece alone to one of the most intrigued-filled courts in the world. Not for years and years, at least.

Daja felt cold at the thought, even with the skies above so perfect and cloudless that Tris might have arranged it for them herself.

“Maybe,” Sandry said, her tone cautious. “If Uncle wanted me to. I suppose I’ll have to visit eventually, but I never liked it very much when my parents brought me. I remember how relieved I was when Uncle said there was a place for me at Winding Circle instead.” Her voice was uncharacteristically sad. Daja didn’t know if it came from remembering her parents, or something else.

“Because you were able to learn magic?” Daja guessed. That was how she felt, sometimes. It troubled her, to think that her happiness with learning magic had been bought with her family’s deaths. Sandry had been in a similar situation; ladies were supposed to restrict themselves to the finest needlework.

“No!” Sandry said with a laugh, her brief dip in mood forgotten. “Well, a little.” She gave a fond pat to the embroidery, as another kind of noblewoman would to a lapdog. “But I meant because of you and Lark and Tris and Briar and Rosethorn and—well, everyone. I love living here. I’d never leave, if I could.” She looked directly at Daja, small face very serious. “It was meeting you that made me realize that. You were the first friend I made, after—everything. Well. Besides Niko, I suppose.”

You were mine, too, Daja thought. Her heart beat oddly fast. She said quickly, “It’s not as if you had much to choose from in those horrible dormitories. What was that girl’s name, the one you took it upon yourself to save me from?” She kept her voice very light, as the though the incident had not meant very much.

“Liesa fa—something,” Sandry said. She shook her head wryly at herself. “It’s not as if it were long ago…”

It had been Liesa fa Nadlen. Daja would remember that for the rest of her life. And she remembered the conversation in the garden, too, though it wasn’t special in any way. She and Sandry sat together companionably for another half an hour, before Rosethorn called them in to eat. They must have done the same thing hundreds of times, at least.

When Daja looked back—when she finally found the end of a thread and began cautiously to untangle it from the rest—that afternoon, gilded and idealized in her memory, was the beginning point. The privacy of it, how she had tried to guess at Sandry’s thoughts, the fear of Sandry leaving, the heat in her face that wasn’t from the sun. It was that afternoon that she remembered when she realized that she liked girls— and then again, an embarrassing amount of time later, when she began to admit to herself how she felt about Sandry.

At the time, she didn’t know any of that was coming, and the only hint was her own confused feeling of happiness. She should have returned the compliment; she should have told Sandry that she was the first friend Daja had made in her new home, and that meeting her was the first time she had thought of having a home again at all. After all, it was true.

Instead she craned her neck to lean over the open embroidery box, and kissed her, quickly and awkwardly. She hadn’t thought about it at all before doing it—just that she wanted to—and immediately she pulled back, embarrassed for some reason she couldn’t have named.

Sandry smiled at her—Daja could feel that smile reflected in her own bones— and that was the perfect, golden cap to the memory of the afternoon; one that she held onto tightly in bed that night, and that kept her warm for a long time afterwards.


End file.
